Forge of War (Jack of Harts)

by Pryde, Medron

  “Careful’s my middle name, Ma’am,” he answered with a smile and began tapping displays to make certain the fighter was ready. It was make-work really. Betty had already done it all, but it was time to look busy.

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she said in a scolding tone. “You know my terms. When this war is over…”

  Jack raised one hand and met her gaze, his jaw set stubbornly. “When? How can you be so sure we’ll win?”

  Betty pursed her lips. “I’m not. I’m sure the war will end though, win or lose, and when it does, you know my terms. I won’t be…this…forever,” she said with a wave of her hand towards the hangar around them. “This is our job. Don’t let it become your life.”

  Jack set his jaw harder. “Tell that to the people who don’t have a life anymore thanks to those Shang.”

  Betty gave him a sad smile. “I understand,” she whispered.

  His eyes narrowed and he almost asked how she could. He kept his mouth closed and shook his head, though. He pushed the anger that almost made him say that away, took a deep breath, and let it go again. He closed his eyes, opened them, and met her gaze. “Yeah, me too.” He placed his hand on the panel next to her, apologizing for what he almost said.

  She blinked, meeting his gaze, and he had the feeling she knew what he hadn’t said. Her smile grew happier though and she placed her small hand on his finger, turning the projectors in the fighter up to solid so he could feel her. “Then let’s do our job, Jack.”

  He nodded towards her. “Yeah. Our job.” He looked outside to see the last of the Cowboys climbing into their fighters. “Speaking of which.” The last canopy began to close.

  “This is Cowboy One to all Cowboys,” Lieutenant Colonel Johanson transmitted from his fighter. “Do you read?”

  “Roger,” Cowboy Six answered, and the sixth light appeared on Jack’s display. As each pilot added his “Roger” to the list, another light appeared until only one light remained dark.

  “Roger,” Jack transmitted and his light came on.

  “Excellent,” Johanson transmitted. “Datalinks are shiny. Now we have a special mission, Cowboys. Mom, can you beam us out?” he asked as his fighter pulled up off the deck.

  “Your beam, Cowboys,” Connie said over the speakers as a beam of red light appeared in the middle of the hangar, leading out to the bow. “Good luck with your mission.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Johanson transmitted. “Snuggle up, Cowboys, and stay on my beam.” His fighter’s engines flared to life and he accelerated away.

  Jack relaxed back in his seat as Betty took the fighter off the deck, slotting into line just below another Cowboy. Betty accelerated to follow while maintaining formation with the other Cowboys and stayed on the beam. Ahead of them, the other squadrons pulled away from the beam, giving them clear traffic out of the hangar. The fighter passed through the energy curtain holding the air in and the multicolored gravity waves of hyperspace surrounded them.

  Jack looked to starboard, where the U.S.S. New Jersey held station two kilometers away, even her kilometer-long bulk almost fading into the background in the multicolored kaleidoscope that was hyperspace. He could barely spot the rest of the task force escorting the Constellation, on the absolute edge of detection range. Detection ranges in hyperspace were so short that only the centermost ships of a standard formation could see everybody in the fleet. In really big fleets, fleet command depended on other ships to tell them where the rest of the formation lay.

  “Stay on me,” Johanson ordered and pulled up. Jack and the other Cowboys followed the wake he cut into hyperspace, moving above the carrier. “Cowboy Flight is away, Mom. You are clear to maneuver. Good hunting.”

  “Good hunting, Cowboys,” Connie answered and the Constellation turned towards the New Jersey, her engines twisting hyperspace around her. “Commencing surface action in…three…two…one…now.” Her transmission cut out as the fleet carrier flashed and disappeared. The other ships of the squadron flashed and disappeared as well, leaving the Cowboys alone in the sea of hyperspace.

  “What are we doing, sir?” Jack asked, his plot still showing the last update of the battle, with the Peloran squadron driving deeper into the Shang flank.

  “We’re waiting,” Johanson answered with an amused tone. “The Shang have to have a reserve. This is too small an attack force to punch us out. So we are waiting for them to commit that reserve.”

  “Ah…and then we flank them,” Jack said with a smile.

  “Exactly,” Johanson transmitted. “So right now, we snuggle up and wait for word.”

  A message drone flashed into being in front of their formation. It flashed them a datadump and Jack winced at the story it told. The New Jersey and the Peloran squadron between them had hammered the Shang force into the defending line, destroying several Shang warships in seconds. And ten seconds ago, another Shang force had arrived to surround the Peloran squadron. The data cut, showing when the drone had been sent.

  “Or maybe we don’t wait much at all,” Johanson added. A beam appeared on the plot, aiming towards the point in hyperspace that correlated with the new Shang flank. “Cowboy One to all Cowboys. Stay snuggled and follow my beam,” Johanson ordered and accelerated down the beam.

  Jack interlaced his fingers and cracked his knuckles, getting ready for action as Betty followed orders, maintaining perfect formation with the other cybers. He watched the display, marking their approach towards their target.

  “Check your music,” Johanson ordered.

  Jack turned to Betty and she smiled. The jammers were active. The fighter accelerated again, following Johanson’s fighter. He glanced at the displays to confirm that they were as shallow as possible in hyperspace, not moving more than a few meters per second faster than the same speed in normal space. They were approaching full correlation between the two, the point where it would take the least amount of energy possible to jump between them. Even at the wall though, it still took a lot of energy to translate, more than any other Terran fighter had ever been able to generate before.

  “Surfacing in three…two…one…” Johanson counted off.

  Jack watched the energy crackling down his Avenger’s nose and shut his eyes.

  “Now!” Johanson ordered.

  Jack saw a flash of blinding light behind his lids, and when his eyes opened the stars glinted in a black sky. He scanned the battle all around him, taking everything in. Earth lay below them just over a light-second away, America in full view. A map display showed the moon and her forts on the far side of Earth, too far away to be of much use here. He squinted and the view zoomed in to show him a squadron of Chinese warships moving in over the Pacific. Fort Honolulu fired towards them, warning them away from the Hawaiian Orbitals. So far, only the Shang seemed willing to fight inside the Lunar Orbit and Jack really hoped the Chinese didn’t decide to join in now.

  He turned to scan the main battle and had just enough time to recognize what he was seeing. Missiles from Earth, the Moon, and various Western Alliance Forts streamed into the battle, but when a missile’s flight time was measured in seconds it was real easy for point defense batteries firing from each Shang ship to kill it. The ground and low-orbit light or gravity-based weapons were quiet, too far away to hit anything if they fired. The Shang now surrounded the American and the Peloran squadrons still protecting Fort Wichita, pouring energy and short-range missile fire into their targets. They’d brought in more reinforcements while the Cowboys moved to this location, and the wreckage of starships floated all around the battlefield, some falling deeper into the gravity well. This was going to be another rough day for the planet if those didn’t get pulled back up.

  Directly ahead of the Cowboys, the Peloran squadron fought for its life, a Shang cruiser between them. Jack squinted and saw the light sheer around the Shang ship showing that its deflection grid was at full power. Nearly all of it was aimed at the Peloran squadron. He saw laser batteries shooting down missiles and fighter
s between the two forces, and a Peloran destroyer belched fire and fell out of formation.

  “Fire!” Johanson snapped and the universe turned inside out.

  Jack had been told that, to all intents and purposes, a gravitic cannon grabbed the laws of gravity by the neck with both hands and throttled them. About all the physics he could remember was something about hundreds of gravities of gravitic sheer compressed into a five centimeter “beam.” It was a decidedly unpleasant experience when two such “beams” passed within meters of the cockpit on either side and made the human inner ear think that “down” was to both sides simultaneously. The eggheads said there were no permanent side effects. Jack doubted them. The Peloran placed their grav cannons outside their ships after all, very far away from any fragile biological crewmembers. There had to be a reason for that.

  There were twelve Avengers in Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 112, and each of them carried two grav cannons. The Shang cruiser had the vast majority of its deflection grid aimed at the Peloran ships, with very little power dedicated to the direction the Cowboys came from. Twenty-four cannons ripped through the deflection grid like it was tissue paper and drove deep into the ship’s structure. A moment later, forty-eight lasers began to fire, pulsing from one target to the next, running from nose to stern, destroying every external sensor, weapon, or engine port they could detect.

  In the end, the laser fire wasn’t needed. One of the grav cannons breached the missile magazine for the forward missile bays. The missiles were in safety shut down mode, not yet sent to the bays for firing, but when the gravitic beam slashed through the magazine, it effectively tore several of the missiles apart and compacted them inside the beam’s area of effect, causing a large percentage of the missiles’ mass, some of which was energetically active when brought together, to combine in extremely unstable ways. Once the beam passed through, and hundreds of gravities of sheer no longer held the missiles together, the pieces of former fusion-powered missiles once again became separate.

  The separation was suitably explosive and the bow of the Shang ship vaporized. The ship slewed violently out of formation, spraying wreckage as it spun away from the battle.

  Cowboy squadron spun as one, the cybers in charge acting in unison, and aimed at another cruiser. “Fire,” Johanson ordered and twenty-four grav cannons ripped into another target.

  Their second target was prepared, spending the seconds it took for the Cowboys to kill its compatriot to reorient its deflection grid to protect itself from their attack. Twenty of the beams twisted off into space where distance and loss of control made them impotent after a mere few hundred kilometers. One of those slew through a flight of Peloran missiles and they exploded spectacularly in empty space. The other four cannons managed a direct hit and penetrated the grid, doing some damage to the armor, but none of them had enough power and control left to break through the dense armored hull.

  The same could not be said about the four much larger grav cannons the Peloran battleship fired a moment later. Mere seconds before, the Shang deflection grid had held, twisting the Peloran weapons away in the most classic of all defenses, not being where the weapons fire arrived. Now a significant percentage of the cruiser’s total reactor load was spent holding the fighters on their flank to “mere” armor damage. All four Peloran beams smashed through the weakened deflection grids and hit the cruiser like the hammers of ancient gods. The Peloran capital weapons were not measured in mere hundreds of gravities, or in centimeters. The second Shang cruiser did not explode. The four beams sucked sections of the ship in, compressing the compartments inside each one, ripping the ship into ever-smaller sections. When the beams faded away, tiny compressed metallic pebbles and larger undamaged but no longer connected pieces of ship fanned away from where a ship of war had fought seconds ago.

  “My God,” Jack whispered in awe.

  “Yeah,” Betty answered in a low voice.

  The displays flashed in warning and Jack’s eyes went wide. It hadn’t taken long for the Shang to send a couple squadrons of fighters their way at all.

  “Go HOTAS and bring the fangs out!” Johanson ordered as forty Shang fighters bore down on them.

  Jack smiled at the age-old order and placed his hands on the throttle and stick. If the Shang wanted a dogfight, they were going to get one. “Let’s dance,” he said and pulled the stick over.

  “I think it’s time for the Tango,” Betty answered as the Cowboy formation exploded, fighters peeling away into flights of two fighters.

  “Sounds good to me.” Jack brought the stick hard over again, and felt the fighter buck around him from a near miss. He really wasn’t doing the lion’s share of the work, even now. Betty did most of it, with her near-light-speed reaction time, maneuvering the fighter in a nearly random program of evasive maneuvers. The problem was, that even the best cybers were simply not as random as a genetic human, and with enough experience they could be predicted.

  Jack pulled the throttle back hard and the engines flared to life. If asked, he would have said he had no idea why he did it. He just felt like doing it. He was embracing the randomness of life that he was best at. A split second later, a missile passed through where they would have been and went on its merry way.

  “Betty, I do think someone’s trying to shoot us. Do you have an answer?” He flicked the stick over, altering their course just a little bit to starboard. Betty maneuvered them around that base course, thrusters flaring with each shift, while the laser turret spun and fired.

  “Response on the way,” Betty returned. “Damn. Deflection grid held.”

  “Do it,” Jack ordered and set his teeth.

  The Avenger spun around on its axis, turning towards its attacker, as another almost random flare of thrusters sent her up and over a salvo of missiles. The laser turret pulsed the deflection grid, bending away from the target with each shot. The grav cannons missed the Shang fighter that was desperately maneuvering to avoid being killed, but swept across its deflection grid, collapsing it instantly. The four barrels of the laser turret went to rapid fire, shredding the fighter in seconds as the Avenger spun back to face her general course.

  Jack swallowed as a frigate came back into view, her laser turrets and missile bays spraying all over the Cowboy formation. He glanced at the displays to see that a quarter of the Shang fighters, one credited to his wingman, were down with no Cowboy casualties. A flash of light heralded a successful missile strike on Johanson’s fighter. Jack gritted his teeth as the Colonel’s Avenger spun out of control, deflection grid sputtering in and out.

  “Cover him!” Jack ordered and Betty brought their Avenger around to fire the grav cannons at a fighter trying to take advantage of the Colonel’s situation. Lasers followed up and the Shang fighter ceased to exist.

  The frigate focused fire though and Johanson’s fighter ripped apart under the assault. His wingman banked away, lasers playing across more Shang fighters, but the frigate’s fire turned to destroy it too.

  “Damn,” Jack whispered, scanning the plot quickly. The two senior officers, the only two Cowboys who had been pilots when The War started, were gone, just like that. The Peloran squadron was making headway against its attackers, and the Peloran fighter formation was reforming now that the Cowboys had pulled some of the Shang off their case.

  But if they didn’t do something about the damned frigates, they were all going to be in a world of hurt. He took in a deep breath, readying himself to give the order. He wasn’t the highest ranked of those remaining, but somebody had to give the order to do it.

  “Wait one second,” Betty said, smiling at him.

  Jack let the breath out slowly, gazing at Betty’s hologram.

  “Cowboy Three to all Cowboys,” Woodchuck’s voice transmitted into his cockpit as the frigate flashed on his displays, showing the whole datalink had locked it. “Let’s kill it.”

  “Oorah,” Jack answered the man that was barely his superior without hesitation in chorus with the other Cowboys.
He smiled at Betty. “I didn’t think he’d step up.”

  “Neither did he until he had to,” she returned, her avatar looking towards the frigate in the distance. “Don’t worry, Jack. Your time will come. I have faith in you.”

  The Cowboys swung around, locking onto the frigate, and twenty grav cannons fired on the frigate. It was a much smaller target than the cruisers they’d fired on before, designed for fighter suppression. True warships could destroy it with relative ease, while it lacked the heavy weapons to threaten larger warships. That was probably why the Peloran warships had mostly ignored it and its sisters in favor of ships that were actually penetrating their deflection grids. Unfortunately for the frigate, the Avengers mounted gravitic cannons designed to take down larger warship deflection grids. A grid designed to deflect the lighter weapons fighters typically carried collapsed under the Avengers’ fire and the frigate belched atmosphere and fire. The laser turrets played across it and the frigate began to drift out of the conflict, power systems sputtering out.

  The displays flashed and Jack glanced up to see Cowboy Eight’s damage codes going red. That would be Drew and Jasmine. Her nose flew away, separated by the concentrated fire of a dozen Shang fighters. Her laser turret went with it. The damaged fighter swung away from her attackers, trying to open the range.

  “Covering fire!” Charles ordered and nine Avengers swung around as they maneuvered randomly, avoiding enemy fire as much as possible. Gravity twisted through the Shang formation, ripping deflection grids and fighters apart, and thirty-six laser barrels sought out the survivors.

  Jack brought the stick over, because he felt like it, and scanned the displays. Two more of those frigates still harassed the Peloran fighters, ripping holes in their screening formation. Someone had to do something about them soon.

  “Betty?” he asked.

  “Almost certainly,” she answered.

  A frigate flashed in the display. “Cowboy Three to all Cowboys. Flights Four, Five, and Six, focus on that frigate and kill it. Flights Two and Three, we will provide covering fire. Now!”